A tale of two teachers

What makes a teacher memorable?

Why must a teacher even be memorable?

What's the job of a teacher? Is it to ensure that the subject matter they are teaching gets communicated clearly, at least for the moment that they tried to parcel it into your brain? Or is it something grander, something supposedly more meaningful than merely getting the subject matter across?

I'll separate my answer to the above in two broad categories, which largely corresponds to the two different kinds of teacher I've met in my life.

Now, it doesn't mean that a teacher can only be one of the two. Far from it. The greatest ones are those who combine the two qualities into a single whole, and change their students' lives in the process.

The first thing that a teacher must do, and it is rather table stakes for a teacher, is to get the pedagogical job done. In other words, what they teach, you must understand. Now, the student has a big role to play in this too, but the teacher's most basic level of success depends squarely on whether what they teach you do understand.

As basic as that sounds, there is still a long road to mastery for this style of teaching. Someone who is great at this, understands the mind of the student. They understand the nook and crannies inside the student's mind where logical fallacies reside, they can estimate the mental jumps that the median student in their class can manage to make, and they are deeply familiar with the correlation between the specific points of complexity in the subject matter, and the specific gaps in logic that those will lead to in the student's mind.

This teacher, one whom I have known and studied Math from previously, is a master of the subject, and a master at mapping that subject matter to the median child's mind in a way that leaves no gaps in logic and understanding.

In the words of Parker J. Palmer, this teacher has successfully blended the Subject and the Student into their teaching style.

If you've ever been taught by someone like this, then you'll probably remember them fondly, and with a certain respect for how they brought clarity about the subject into your mind.

But there's another level of remembrance that I've experienced for another teacher. And you might have had a teacher in your own life who made you feel that way too. The feeling I'm talking about is something that goes beyond respect for their teaching, and beyond the feeling of awe that you might have felt at one point for an awesome teacher who was a master of their subject matter.

Some teachers have a way, not only of helping you understand something, but also of making you feel understood. Someone who accepts you, who opens a door for you to come in with all of your flaws and all of your ignorance, and makes you feel seen.

I've had such a teacher, and I'm infinitely grateful for having had them in my life. Which doesn't really make sense, if you think about it. I mean, it's really not the teacher's stated job to make an impact on you beyond getting the subject matter across to you clearly, efficiently and effectively. But that's the thing about this second kind of teacher, they don't keep in the stated job lane on the pedagogical highway.

Granted that, as a student, your primary motivation for even sitting in a classroom is the learning objective that the teacher has promised to achieve with you. That they will not only teach the subject matter well, but that they will teach it well in a way that's tailored for you. And that's where most ideas of pedagogical excellence stop, because even that first kind of teacher is unbelievably hard to find.

But there's an elephant in the classroom that this idea of pedagogical excellence is completely ignoring. As Parker J. Palmer will tell you, this idea of teaching excellence completely ignores the most important element in the act of teaching: the teacher themselves.

The first kind of teacher successfully melded the Student, and the Subject, into a singular whole, but the second kind of teacher, the one who made you feel seen and understood and accepted, successfully melded themselves, the Teacher, as well into the equation. By bringing themselves, and their experiences, and their personality, identity and vulnerability, into the hot thought cauldron that is a classroom, they are able to affect not only your mind, but also your heart. They fill not only the logic gaps in your brain, but the much more meaningful, much more impactful on your growth, and the much more personal, psychological gaps in your heart.

That shared vulnerability, the personality that they put on display in front of a room full of students, is what pulls vulnerability out of you as well, and makes for the most memorable teacher-student moments you may have ever experienced in your life.

That’s what makes for the most memorable teacher. What you get from them is much beyond the subject matter, and later in life, the feelings they unlocked in those shared moments of vulnerability in the classroom, is what you will remember when you think of them.

Not the fact that they taught you Chemistry, and despite no matter how much more you may like Math over Chemistry.